this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
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I think the two points missing from most debates are
The imperial system does a damn good job at measuring things the way a human would. A foot is roughly the length of a big foot. A single degree farenheit is just big enough that you could guesstimate it with enough practice. If the temperatures are negative, you dump sand on the roads instead of salt.
It's like seven units of measurement in a trenchant. You never have to convert gallons to cubic miles. You never have to convert from dots to angstoms, and nobody has ever had to convert the surveyors mile to the nautical mile. It feels schizophrenic because claiming it's one singular system is like saying Italian, French, and Portuguese languages are all regional dialects of Europeanese.
My point isn't "it's not a bug, it's a feature", I'm saying for the average non-scientist there may be a logical reason why we like it so much
Yeah. You're used to it
No no. The rest of the world is constantly out of sorts on what common measurements are. It's like how monolingual non-English-speaking people are constantly aware they're not speaking the natural language of English.
/s
interesting take
Lol is it?
Think of all the different numbers you have to divide different units in our system by to convert.
numbers are base 10 for every single society on earth. Metric units always scale by 10. It's literally perfect for how we interpret numbers
*every single western society